Golang Multi-line String

A string refers to a sequence of one or more characters. Although strings have a fundamental concept across programming languages, go treats strings a little differently. In Go, a string is a slice of bytes. We can create a string by enclosing a sequence of characters inside a pair of double-quotes.

In this guide, we will teach you how to work with strings, from the basics of creating a basic string to various ways of how to create a multi-line string.

Golang Basic String

In go, we can create a string by enclosing the characters inside double-quotes as shown below:

You can print a string by using the methods in the fmt package. For example, we can use the Println method to print a string as:

The Println method should take the provided string and output it into the console.

If you want to create a string variable, you can use the var keyword as shown below:

The above technique creates a variable called “str” of type string. We then assign a value to the variable using the assignment operator.

You can also use the string literal method of creating a string variable. This allows the compiler to determine the type of the variable.

An example is as shown as:

Golang Multi-Line String

In Go, we can create a multi-line string in two principal methods. The first method is to use a raw string literal.

Raw String Literal

To create a multi-line string using a raw string literal, we enclose the string inside a pair of back-tick chracters (“).

This method of string creation does not interpret whitespace characters such as n, t, etc. This is what makes this technique very useful.

For example, to create a multi-line string using a raw string literal, we can do:

If we run the code above, we should get an output string as:

NOTE: As mentioned, if you create a string using a raw string literal, you cannot use whitespace characters or include a back-tick character as part of the string.

For example:

The above code should print:

If you want to use white-space characters in your string, use the double-quoted string as discussed previously.

Interpreted String Literals

The second method you can use to create a mult-line string is interpreted strings. In this case, we use string concatenation using the addition operator ( ).

The example below shows how to use interpreted strings.

We use double quote and the addition operator to create a multi-line string in this example. This method allows you to include white-space characters.

Conclusion

This guide taught us how to work with strings in the Go programming language. Using this guide, you now know to methods to create multi-line strings.

Stay tuned for more Go tutorials.